First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate is the rate at which a customer service call gets resolved during the initial contact with a customer service agent – the higher the rate the better. The FCR is a key performance indicator for any customer service center.
It provides a great indication of customer satisfaction level. After all, the more often someone needs to contact customer service to resolve an issue the more likely it is that they will become increasingly frustated with every interaction.
Improving the Customer Experience
A study from SQM Group found that the average FCR rate is 70%. The same study also reports that the biggest priority for contact centers (45% of those survived) is to improve the customer experience. It makes sense then that one way to improve the customer’s experience with your business is to increase your FCR. A well implemented live chat solution can take you a long way to achieving this objective.
Here are a few tips for leveraging an effective live chat solution – along with the advice of a knowledgeable and experienced live chat vendor – to help you improve the customer experience and your FCR rate.
Live Chat Analytics
If your live chat solution provides you with intelligent and useful reports and real-time analytics then this information can be used to help you identify certain characteristics about your website visitor before they even initiate contact with you. From identifying site visitor location, browser type, page, website path and a variety of other pieces of valuable information you can begin to determine the concerns and potential issues of the customer – proactively. This way you’ll be more prepared to address the customer’s issues as expeditiously as possible.
Live Chat Automation
With every customer interaction you become more attuned to the issues your customer’s encounter. As you would expect, many times these issues are common among your customer service interactions. To improve the speed and consistency of your interaction use your live chat feature’s ability to create canned responses to common questions. With this, even a new customer service agent can address a customer issue as quickly and thoroughly as a pro.
Live Chat Agent Training & Motivation
The effective use of live chat requires more than just live chat software. It requires knowledge and experience in how to implement and manage the use of this powerful solution. The right vendor can help you to train your live chat support agents so that they are highly efficient and productive. As you can imagine, if you don’t use a live chat tool efficiently and productively then you probably won’t move the dial on your FCR rate. Live chat is great – but it cannot resolve everything. Also, consider some type of reward for high-performing live chat agents. This motivation can lead to FCR rate improvement and is easy to measure with the right live chat reporting.
